So Many New Marketing Tactics, Tools And Technologies, Oh My!

How Can Anyone Be Sure What To Do And When To Do It?

Square 2 Marketing was founded on one simple principle: Help people get better at marketing, sales and revenue generation in general.

Back in 2003, we kept meeting really smart business leaders who were great at what their business did (manufacturing, accounting or software), but when it came to marketing, they seemed a little lost.

They were trying different tactics and not one seemed to generate the growth they needed.

Our goal was to help them, either by showing them how to do it or doing it for them.

While our goal has remained the same, the world has changed dramatically since our start in 2003. Remember, in 2003 Facebook wasn’t even a company yet (it was founded in 2004).

Today, almost 100 tactics (or variations on tactics) exist for marketing alone, and almost 7,000 different marketing and sales technologies are available.

The lines between marketing and sales have blurred, and marketing people now have access to thousands of data points on the performance of their programs.

What was complicated in 2003 is exponentially more complicated now, and it's equally as challenging to get the perfect combination of tactics, data and technology to drive month-over-month revenue growth.

As we travel around today talking to CEOs, CMOs, VPs of marketing and VPs of sales at companies of all shapes and sizes, there is one rallying cry across the entire community: “We don’t know what to do, in what order and when.”

Of course, everyone knows you need a great website, email marketing, social media marketing, a blog, content marketing, video marketing and whatever other tactics you think will work. But creating the orchestrated and ongoing revenue generation effort that integrates with sales and customer service and produces month-over-month revenue growth — well, that remains elusive, at least until today.

Meet MAXG 

In our quest to help people get smarter about marketing and sales, execute more efficient marketing and sales efforts, and build the revenue generation machines that help them grow their companies in a scalable, repeatable and predictable way, we created MAXG.

MAXG (Marketing Advisor for eXponential Growth) takes your sales and marketing data, marries it with industry-specific benchmark data and aligns it with your stated business goals.

MAXG then produces prescriptive program, tactic-specific and action-oriented recommendations from our proprietary recommendation engine based on thousands of experiences using a variety of sales and marketing tactics proven to drive revenue.

Perhaps even better, MAXG will prioritize everything you could do in order of the task’s ability to improve results and the time it’s going to take to deliver the task.

In short, you now know what to do, when to do it and how to do it if you want to hit your desired revenue goals.

What Is A Marketing Recommendation Engine?

Look at the huge collection of marketing and sales-related software tools on the market.

Most of them help you do stuff, such as send emails, create dashboards, write and publish blogs, host and update website pages, add chat to your website or create videos.

That does solve one problem. It helps you get this work done more efficiently, and it even automates a lot of it.

But none of these tools tell you what to do and in what order to do them. They definitely don’t tell you this in the context of your own revenue goals.

According to Analytics Vidhya, “A recommendations engine filters the data using different algorithms and recommends the most relevant tactics or tasks to users. It first captures the past performance of a marketing or sales tactic, and based on that, recommends tactics and tasks that the user might be likely to use to improve performance of their overall revenue programs.”

That is exactly what MAXG was designed to do. MAXG knows what you’ve been doing and how each of your tactics is performing. It knows what your goals are and then compares your performance vs. optimal performance.

MAXG also knows how you’re doing compared to other similar companies in your industry and provides you benchmark performance data as well.

But what MAXG is amazing at is then recommending to you a list of action items that improve performance based on MAXG’s programmed experiences and the learning it receives from everyone who uses the software.

Yes, you heard that right. MAXG gets smarter over time as it gets to know your company and all of the other companies using MAXG.

How You Would Work With MAXG

You should think about MAXG as a fellow team member, and in particular, someone on your team who has a ton of experiences with every single tactic in every single industry and a database of actual performance data to pull from.

Here’s how it works:

1. You check in with MAXG.
2. MAXG accesses your real-time marketing and sales performance data from your live systems like HubSpot, Google Analytics, SEMrush or Marketo.
3. MAXG evaluates your performance data vs. industry benchmark data and in context to your goals.
4. MAXG then produces a list of action items or steps you should take in order to improve your results.

That’s it. Everything that makes marketing and sales so complicated is synthesized and presented back to you in order of priority.

Take MAXG’s recommendations, or reprioritize right in the system based on your organization or approach.

Want all of the SEO tasks in MAXG found? No problem. Want all of the web optimization tasks in MAXG found? Not a problem. Want all of the content marketing tasks MAXG recommended? Also not a problem. They are all right in front of you, ready for you to take action.

Whether you check in with MAXG daily, weekly or monthly, it’s always going to run the same evaluation, comparison and recommendation cycle. You’ll always know what to work on, when to work on it and what exactly to do to improve the performance of your program.

How Does MAXG Know What To Recommend?

While some of this is proprietary, the short answer is we taught MAXG everything we know. We used over 20 years of marketing and sales program performance data and experience to get it started.

But that wasn’t enough for us. We built MAXG to be a continuous learner, so now and forever into the future, it’s going to get smarter and smarter based on all the users accessing its AI-powered brain.

When MAXG finds a highly successful tactic at one company, it’ll use that intelligence to guide the recommendations across other companies.

The more people who use MAXG, the more program recommendations it has access to and the smarter it gets.

We’ve already found the recommendations highly efficient and effective when applied to our clients. Now we’re ready to let MAXG help others, too.

Finally, an AI-based recommendation engine that is going to know your company, your goals, your marketing and your sales performance data, and be able to help you know exactly what to do, when to do it and how to do it — so you hit your revenue goals month over month.